There’s a pretty funny video making the rounds. It involves Lando Calrissian becoming a personal injury attorney and representing storm troopers injured by reckless Jedi.
It’s pretty funny, but totally unrealistic. I mean, Lando would never be a personal injury lawyer. Clearly, Calrissian would be a family law attorney who represents women. “Hello, what have we here? You truly belong in your house… with half of his stuff.”
Sorry, I’m gonna let the video finish, but Lando Calrissian would make the best divorce lawyer of all time…
If you don’t know the video I’m talking about, it’s an old home movie from 1992 of Shaun Sperling’s bar mitzvah. In the video, the then 13-year-old boy dances — quite enthusiastically, in front of dozens of cheering friends and family members — to Madonna’s “Vogue.” It’s just as goofy and awesome as it sounds.
Well, 20 years later Sperling is a commercial litigation attorney in Chicago. In between appearances on the Today Show and Jimmy Kimmel, we caught up with him to ask if his newfound fame has affected his legal work over the last few weeks. In short: it’s been great.…
I’m just kidding. We’ve got a fun departure memo from an associate who happens to be from Greenberg, but I don’t think this woman’s departure has anything to do with the firm’s financial health. Instead, she’s just pursuing new opportunities.
And it looks like she’ll be leaving with fond memories of her time at Greenberg. We know that from her choice of ’90s R&B bands that she used to herald her leaving….
Early in July, we wrote about a family court judge who found himself in hot water after a video of him yelling at a pastor who was going through a divorce went viral.
Now, the judge has been hit with expedited ethics charges — not over his hot-tempered behavior, though, but for allegedly ignoring orders from higher-ups on the state judicial food chain. And, as you might expect, the judge is not exactly Zen about facing the charges…
* So now the Tulsa law dean is making it sound like the babysitting gig was just one of the many heroic efforts Tulsa undertakes to make sure students can make ends meet while in law school. This from a school that charges $32,056 per year plus another $7,993 for room and board for the privilege of attending the #99 law school in the land. Oh, but presenting babysitting opportunities is a way that the administration can help. [TU College of Law Blog]
* This is how 90% of my conversations go when somebody asks me if they should go to law school. The other 10% end in fisticuffs and comfort eating. [Constitutional Daily]
* If a law professor uses a hypo this fall based on 50 Shades of Grey (affiliate link), please whip it out (your camera phone) and give us a load (of that hilarious video). [Law Librarian Blog]
* Apple and Samsung: they kind of need each other to bring balance to the force. And don’t forget to check out Chris Danzig’s Twitter feed for more trial updates. [iDownloadBlog]
* What does one Jones Day hiring partner think interviewees should never do at lunch? Check out his interview on Bloomberg Law below…
I want you to digest that headline for a moment. This weekend, a rising 2L is going to share his “system” for succeeding in law school, a system he honed — for a whole year — at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. The kid is trying to charge people money to attend his seminar.
Oh, but he was really good at law school. He was able to transfer out of TJLS to George Washington University Law School. He starts there in this fall. Success!
Actually, let me give you the full, prestigious biography he posted to Top Law Schools. We’ve also got video footage of the guy, providing “The 21st Century Approach” to succeeding in law school.
It’s not every day that the student selected to speak at a law school commencement admits that he went to law school because he watched the movie My Cousin Vinny. You certainly don’t often hear Mr. Cousin Vinny admit that he thought going to law school would be the key to a job with a top salary.
But then again, you don’t often watch the valedictorian’s speech for the class of 2012 at Thomas M. Cooley Law School.
The thing is… instructive. I’ve heard a bunch of commencement speeches, but mainly from Ivy League types. The student speaker at a school like Cooley is, well, different.
Staci here. The bar exam is right around the corner, and fear is starting to set in — fear of not being able to cram enough law into your head, fear of confusing necessary information, and the worst fear of all, the fear of failure.
But for all the Adderall addicts out there, these fears don’t seem to exist. Not sure about your mastery of a particular MBE topic? Just pop another pill and study for eight hours straight. Problem solved! (Note that we do not condone using study drugs to get ahead of the curve on the exam.)
If you’re not a chronic pill popper, not to worry, because Mr. Bar Exam has got some advice for you about the “brain foods” that you can eat to improve your memory and concentration….
Divorce, so I hear, is not a fun experience. Emotions run high, hearts get broken, money has to be divided among hostile parties. The last thing you want when you’re going through divorce is to have the judge handling your case scream at you in court, in front of your soon-to-be ex-wife, threatening to put you in jail, and saying he dislikes you so much that he should recuse himself from the case.
Sounds pretty terrible, right? Maybe even unbelievable? Well, straight from West Virginia, we’ve got video of our Judge of the Day doing just that…
Staci here. As a frequent bar exam studier, I can tell you that the routine gets really old, really quickly. A day in the life of your average bar exam studier goes something like this: Wake up. Class. Library. Study. Cry. Drink. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a terrible, terrible time in law school graduates’ lives, and unfortunately there’s not much that can be done to avoid the epic monotony.
But in the meantime, there are other important things to focus on, like the upcoming practice MBE. How can you balance your studies without freaking out? Let’s see what Mr. Bar Exam has to say….
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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There’s a pretty funny video making the rounds. It involves Lando Calrissian becoming a personal injury attorney and representing storm troopers injured by reckless Jedi. 
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